I finished my first novel Tree Bats on a Waterslide in the early morning on May 2, 2026. It’s been a long road…
Tree Bats on a Waterslide is a darkly comic literary novel about a twenty-five-year-old woman obligated to attend her mother’s gay wedding on a cruise ship. There, everyone from her hometown seems to remember much less about the past than she does — and expects her to participate in their unremembering.
I wrote the first draft of this novel in 2015–2016, which was then just 200 pages of stream of consciousness writing. That original draft of the novel includes pieces of writing from as early as 2009–2010.
I wrote the second draft of the novel (the first real one) in 2019–2020, which built on several short stories I had written in 2017-2018. I workshopped these stories as part of an undergraduate-level creative writing course at Boston University that I took as a then MPH student. I then applied for and participated in the GrubStreet Novel Generator program in 2019.
I produced a third, revised draft of the novel in 2021–2022 after receiving feedback from a number of peers and then shelved the project after sending out a few queries and feeling discouraged.
The idea to re-write the story as “a gay wedding on a cruise ship” and use the prior drafts as backstory and flashbacks came to me sometime around 2023. I started working on a re-write in spring 2024, during a dark chapter of my life. I only managed to complete a few chapters, but I was excited enough about the story direction that I knew I wanted to finish it.
I wrote the majority of the fourth and final draft of the 110,000 word novel from summer 2025 through spring 2026. My goal was to finish the novel before my thirty-second birthday, which I managed to do.
I have long wondered when I would know that I was finished with this project, but the sense of completion is unequivocal this time. I have said what I wanted to say, collected all of the disparate writings I wanted to include within it, and feel like I did justice to these characters’ stories.
I was thinking today about next steps for the project. I am going to shelf it for a month, and then in June, I will do line-edits and prepare to query. I will then query the novel for traditional publishing over the summer. As I await responses to queries, I plan to involve 8–12 beta/sensitivity readers. If I don’t receive a positive response in 2026, I will self-publish in fall 2027.
Whether or not the publishing industry will want this novel is out of my hands and is not something I am going to worry too much about. It will be on its way to publication within the next year or so either way.
My first novel is finally finished!
Lyra McMahon
